kareina

Today I paged down on FB till I came to Duke Flieg's short story of the week . I always love his stories, I seem to fall exactly in the middle of his target market group, but this one was just such a beautiful story, with "all the feels" as they say these days, that, after I dried my tears, I felt the need to share it with a friend who I thought really ought to read it, so I used the "share in messenger" option.

Then, thought of another person I thought might especially enjoy it, and then I thought of a few more, and then I started paging down the list of friends that shows when one is in the "share in messenger" mode, clicking on at least one per page. I chose friends who create things, or who I know would appreciate that sort of magic, or who I thought might enjoy the play of emotions the story evokes.

Eventually, I realised that I had had been pressing the share rather a lot, so, curious, I exited that screen and opened messenger to count. 45 people! That doesn't count the many names I saw and didn't share the story with, because they are also friends with Flieg, and probably didn't need my help to call attention to it. Normally I am content to read the stories and leave a comment for Flieg saying what I appreciated this time. This is the first time I felt so compelled to share. I hope that they all enjoy it (those that have time to read it of course, I have already had a few people reply with "thanks, I will look later", and I expect that some of them are likely to forget). A couple of others have already replied saying that they also found the story beautiful.

I am certain that the story would have made me cry no matter when I read it, but I think I may have cried a bit extra since things have been so challenging emotionally lately. I have mentioned my housemate, E, who is living here on an extended visitor's visa until the end of June so that she can finish up her Master's degree. She's had a very rough year (and a not so easy life overall), and this weekend she got yet one more piece of bad news that shook her enough that she quit eating (saying that she just couldn't keep anything down). By Sunday evening she was doing poorly enough that she gave me permission to call the hospital, and after consulting with the 24 hour psychiatric urgent care people they said I should bring her in.

I wasn't certain were to bring her, so I tried first the main door, which happened to have someone leaving just as I walked towards it, so I asked and she said to go around to the back of the building. Around the back of the building I found the entrance for the Emergency room, and we tried that. Right now you enter the door into a foyer and you press a button on a screen for either serious emergency (symptoms of stroke, heart attack, extreme bleeding, etc.), or less urgent emergency (I can't recall the exact Swedish phrases they used). I pressed the less urgent option, and a while later a computer monitor activated and a human spoke to us. When I explained that we had called and been told to bring her in, they said that we need to go a bit further around the building to the entrance labeled "psykiatrisk akutvård".

That door is locked, but had a call button to push. Very shortly thereafter two people came to the door. When I said we had called ahead and who we were, they said that yes, they had been expecting us. They asked if we had any symptoms of covid or other illness, and since we didn't they took our temperatures (in our ear), and let us into a waiting room.

A bit later another couple of people came and did a pre-screening, asking a variety of questions, taking her blood pressure, taking her temperature again (this time with a hand held thing that one points at the forehead) etc. They went away saying that the doctor would be along soon. Then another person came and asked for a urine sample (not easy to provide, given that she also had had nothing to drink that day, but she managed a few drops).

Then the doctor came and brought us into a consultation room, where she asked lots of questions. I had heard most of what was revealed in the answers before, of course, and it is very clear to me that feeling overwhelmed and upset about the hand she has been dealt is an appropriate and reasonable response. I still wish she were doing better, and that she had had fewer things go wrong in the last year.

Eventually the doctor suggested that E.stay with them, at least for the night, and she agreed. Before I left they gave her a sleeping pill, and much to my delight, she drank water with it.

I got home from dropping her off at midnight on Sunday, and should have gone straight to sleep, but, not surprisingly, I couldn't. So I read fluffy posts on FB for a while and managed to get to sleep just after 02:00. Needless to say, I was not at work by 07:00 the next morning, but I did arrive at 08:30. I managed just over 2.5 hours of work, and decided that I was really too tired to usefully sort archive documents, so I flexed my flex time and went home for a three hour nap.

I got up in time to eat a little something before B. showed up at 15:00 for sledding on my hill. The first time this year that someone has joined me for that. It is more fun with company! Though I spend a lower percentage of my time actually sledding. It was a lovely to play in the snow, and what I really needed. Then I checked in with E. (we had also exchanged a few messages the night before after I got home, and before the sleeping pill worked), who wasn't yet doing as well as I would like.

I should have resumed work on my data processing for my Durham research that evening--I had had such a good meeting with my thesis advisor on Friday, and had been feeling even more keen than ever to get that done, so I can publish the results. But while the sledding helped with emotional equilibrium, I didn't really get by brain on line enough for that, and mostly spent the evening twiddling my thumbs.

This morning I managed to make it to work by 07:40, and put in more than 4.5 hours of actual productive time. Came home and continued reading the archaeological inspired cookbook I bought recently and then took a nap. After my nap I went out for more sledding (alone this time, but B. will return tomorrow), and then came in and did a skype call with E. She is looking better today, but I am still worried for her. But the day is still young, so I think I will try to eat a little something more and do some of that data processing before time for yoga and bed. Wish me luck!

...and I hope that it will be a decent snow year. I woke up today with plenty of energy, so instead of doing an indoor workout I put on several layers of wool (it was +5 C out, and very gently raining), grabbed a shovel and went to do something about the hill. The new hill, behind the earth cellar, where I want to be able to do sledding this winter. However, when David's brother (and his digger) built that hill by dropping a fair bit of mixed rock, dirt, and whatever else used to be behind the sheds this summer it all got dropped very randomly, which meant that the slope on the field side had many sharp pointy rocks sticking out of it. It was also rather peaked.

Therefore I started at the top, and shoveled the very peak a bit to the side to make a wider, more reasonable to stand on platform, and then started working my way down the slope, digging out the rocks that stuck up, using them to build a bit of a curved bank to the side so that sleds won't go the wrong way and do the abrupt drop over the side into the alleyway that leads to the earth cellar entrance. I managed about 1.5 hours of this before my body decided that I really needed more food, and I went back inside.

While eating I played with my Swedish practice on Duolingo on my phone, which meant I had to be connected to the internet, so I was available when Crian asked me to edit something for him, so I went to the computer and did that fairly quickly, and then wished him a good day and went back to the hill, managing to work my way about two-thirds down the slope. In the process there was one largish rock I really wanted to move a bit up hill, into a spot on the side bank that would have been perfect for it, but to do that I would have had to get it over another rock, and it wasn't cooperating, so, instead, I let it roll down hill. I was working on another large rock, that had been sticking out as quite a prominent bump on the slope, trying to get it to slide backwards into the hill, and off the rock it was sitting upon, when I realized that I was hungry enough that what I probably needed to do was go get more food, and then try again.

Pretty much directly after I got inside and washed the mud off of my gloves and set them on the heater to dry David arrived. He had wanted to start work on the trench we need to dig from the road to the house so that fiber optic internet can be installed in the not too distant future (last winter the company had said that it would come in "next summer", but at this point it counts as "next autumn", and I hope that they get it here before the weather starts freezing and the ground becomes difficult to work).

However, David has been working to many hours this week (Tuesday he went to work at 06:00, and then wound up working all night, too, went home for a nap between 06:00 and noon Wednesday, then returned to work on Wednesday afternoon), so he was content to sit on the couch and relax with me as I ate. We wound up resting a good hour and a half, then decided that it would soon be getting dark (it was 15:00, and sun sets right now at 17:00), so if we were going to do anything else outdoors we had better do it.

We started with my hill--he went straight to the hill to have a look at what I had done, and I went to go get the steel rod which makes moving large rocks so much easier. By the time I had arrived he had already picked up the one largish rock I had let roll down the hill, carried it up, and set it into the side bank where I had wanted it. He is that much stronger than I. (...and he doesn't work out at all; is it cheating to use longer muscles and testosterone?) We spent 25 minutes finishing up the re-arranging of the bottom part of the slope, and now all that is left is to bring over a few wheelbarrows full of dirt to cover the nice arrangement of rocks on the bottom of the slope and I will have a decent sledding hill for this winter.

Then we went to start that trench. David didn't want to use a shovel, as he thinks it makes more sense to make it as narrow as possible, and he wondered if we could use the pick-axe more like a plow. So we tried it. We took some webbing from a set of tie-downs and fastened it to the handle of the pick, then he sunk one end of the blade into the ground, I grabbed the other end of the pick blade and attempted to hold it down into the ground while he wrapped the other end of the webbing around his waist and pulled. This approach works, but to do the initial tearing through the grass requires frequent backing up and re-sinking of the pick blade as the point tends to work its way back up to the surface fairly quickly when pulled like that (and I do not have the mass to keep it in the ground myself, though it does come back out less rapidly while I hold it). We also tried a more traditional use of the pick, where he simply holds the handle, sinks the blade into the ground and pulls. It is a faster way to do it, but requires much more energy on his part, and given how little energy he has left after this week at work, he didn't do that long. We only used the pick for the part of the yard between our driveway and the place on the wall where we want the cable to enter the house, and called it good.

I will try to make time this week to take the little hand shovel gardening tool to empty the lose dirt out of that trench, and we will wait on the part that goes across the driveway and down the hill to the road until later, when we know when they are doing the actual installation. He is wondering if, perhaps, we can try still using the pick, but instead tie it to the tractor, and let the tractor do the heavy pulling...

Tomorrow is the Frostheim annual meeting during the day (even after seven years in Sweden it still boggles my mind that we have one meeting a year, instead of monthly) so I will make some progress on embroidery for the hood for the Norrskensbågskytt Northern Light's Archer. With luck I will have the energy to go from there to Folk music before dance in the evening. If so, then I will get even more embroidery done.